Each quarter, a select group of teachers met with parents to discuss how we could together better support students at risk of failing. In addition, we sought to prove document our efforts to address every issue of academic and behavioral difficulties. Today was our turn, the second-grade teachers.

There’s something very fulfilling about making sure that each child is thoroughly assessed and given the tools they need to succeed in the current grade and thrive in the ones to come. It’s extremely gratifying when you figure out just exactly what is needed for that student. To see what you’ve implemented work, makes teaching so worthwhile. And at the end of the year you can wholeheartedly know you have done everything in your power to make sure they were taught.

So, I go into these meetings with a sense of hope because I know that each parent cares more about their child than I do, typically they may simply not know how to help their child. That’s where I come in. I hope to be the bridge where the child and the parent can understand one another and together achieve success.

I prepared everything that I could to identify my students who were at risk of not passing. I entered the principal’s office with my supervisor to discuss them and essentially go through protocol I had become very familiar with.  As always, the tiredness and stress of the day had culminated on our shoulders as we started the meeting. There is so much that we as teachers aim to pour into our students but often there just isn’t enough.

As I talked about my student, my supervisor retorts, “Do you think it’s a low IQ issue or something?” I was shocked. What could she mean? That my student wasn’t capable? She further went on to explain herself, “these[black] students are always like this; I think it is in their [genetic] makeup.” My principal chimed in right behind her.

How could she teach children she believed were not only inferior but incapable due to their race? She was very transparent about explaining herself. She had gotten my full attention then!

“By design,“ I told her “if you give any individual a test in a language that is not their own, they will score lower. I could say the same for you. English is not your first language. To really measure an individual’s mental capacity on any test it has to be in the language they know very well.”

Now all of it made sense to me, all 4 years of this proper rhetoric. Every time I entered an office of one of my superiors, I was met with limitation and racism. I was met with a disdain for the very children they claimed to want to inspire when, in reality, this was a business. These families didn’t know what was rooted within the very delightful faces. I did. Time after time, I saw that they could care less because they were simply paid either way.

I could no longer watch children be victims of an educational system that was never built for their success. Education could be so much more, and it should. That is what I want you to understand.

Peniel, expresses the very heart of who I am not only as a teacher but as an individual. It is our responsibility to care for people in such a way that they will feel like they have encountered love in the reflection of God, Himself.

This type of love only produces transformation and that only nurtures the kind of success we are after.